YES anchor has natural feel for baseball

By Mike Cardillo, Staff writer

Published 6:21 pm, Monday, August 31, 2009

STAMFORD -- It's about 5 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon in July at the YES Network studios on the Stamford waterfront. The New York Yankees are slated to play the Oakland Athletics in two hours -- weather permitting.

In about an hour's time, YES studio host Bob Lorenz needs to have digested all this and go live with the network's pregame show. But before the Westport resident can move forward he must complete a crucial pregame ritual.

"As we like to say around here, it's time to put pants on," said Lorenz as he poked into his in-office wardrobe to pick the night's suit and tie. Nothing yellow or green -- the Athletics colors -- is suggested.

Since joining the network full time in 2003 after working at the now-defunct CNNSI in Atlanta, Lorenz has been one YES' more noticeable faces -- aside from the actual Yankees ballplayers. His duties include hosting the pre-and-post game shows for the Yankees and New Jersey Nets, as well as "Forbes SportsMoney," "Yankees Hot Stove" and various other programs which all told put him on the network nearly 365 times in a given calendar year. The Southern California native recently won a 2009 New York Emmy award for Best Anchor and is part of YES's all-time highest baseball ratings on a regional sports network this season.

For fans of the Yankees, tuning in on YES on a game-by-game basis, Lorenz is a ubiquitous presence setting the game up with the half-hour pregame show before the first pitch, chiming in during the game with studio updates from around the world of baseball and finally digesting the previous nine innings of baseball and facilitating the roughly hour-long postgame show.

On a given night it seems like a daunting process with so many would-be storylines swirling around during the fishbowl that is the Yankees' season. Lorenz, who works upward of 250 pre- and postgame shows per year, is confident in his role as studio host -- a role which he thinks is best when the viewers don't necessarily realize he's on their screens.

"My job, as I see it, the viewer doesn't want to hear me talk, they want to hear (analysts) David Cone or John Flaherty or Al Leiter talk," Lorenz, 45, said. "It's funny, you could have a million things going through your mind, but you pretty much know what you want to talk about. The challenge for me is knowing what I want to say out of a commercial break so it's concise and gets the viewer to what they want to hear. They don't want to hear me rambling on incoherently."

Although he's rarely physically inside or around the Yankees' clubhouse, Lorenz feels tapped into the fabric of the season. He keeps up with the Yankees and all other 29 Major League clubs like most fans by reading the papers and sorting through the Internet.

An hour before the pregame show, Lorenz conference calls with on-site reporter Kimberly Jones to discuss the day's news and breakdown the pregame show with his producer Bill Boland. A little before 6:30, for a 7 p.m. game start, Lorenz heads up to the studio for the pregame show. From there he'll head back down to his office and watch the game on television and keep track of the other comings and goings of the baseball night, most notably what the Red Sox and Rays are doing in the American League East.

When the final out is recorded, he's back up to the studio and unlike the pregame show, the postgame airs live -- without a net or script for that matter. Lorenz enjoys the live element of the show and one of his best memories working at YES was a retrospective the day after Bobby Murcer died in 2008 where he and Yankees announcer Michael Kay sat in the studio and mainly ad-libbed memories of the former Yankee player and broadcaster.

"On a game-by-game basis I watch the game and know there are four or five mains topics we need to hit," Lorenz said of the postgame show. "The best part of doing it, for me it's baseball. I have always loved the live element, because you have one chance to get it right and probably that I get to work with a bunch of people that are as passionate as I am and that we do what we do for a passionate fan base. The fans are so passionate that it makes it easy."

But does it remain easy when the Yankees occasionally hit a bump in the road and the rabid fan base demands answers for losses?

"I try to play it down the middle," he said. "It's a lot easier and a lot more fun when they're winning. You want to try to bring balance every night. If they're in the midst of a losing streak, by the fourth or fifth night you feel like you're beating a team up. That goes if we're talking about the Yankees, the Rays or the Royals. You want to give fans at least a sliver of hope, a reason to keep watching."

It's that level of professionalism that impressed YES president of programming and production John Filippelli, who hired Lorenz in 2002 after he'd done some fill-in work for then studio host Fred Hickman.

"I've been fortunate enough to work with studio hosts like Bryant Gumbel and Bob Costas, the top names in the business," said Filippelli, a Greenwich resident. "Bob has every capability that you want in a studio anchor. He knows his sports. He speaks to the audience, he doesn't speak down to them. He has an everyman quality that the view definitely seems to identify with and resonates with them."

And while the persona that most viewers see of Lorenz on a nightly basis is that of a down-the-middle host who's quick to turn the spotlight on the rest of the broadcast team, it belies his affable off-air personality which includes making his own coffee. Lorenz, who was a lefty pitcher at Cal Poly Pomona before finishing his degree at the University of Southern California, seems as comfortable quoting Yankees Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, whom he worked with on the "Yogi and a Movie" program as the character Gob Bluth from the 2000s comedy series "Arrested Development."

He and his family have settled into Westport, enjoying its New England feel not to mention its 20-minute commute to the studio in Stamford. Lorenz also emcees the yearly Make a Wish Foundation's Make-A-Wish ball each November and has been active in the community including, "contributing to the local economy as far as restaurants go."

Appropriately enough, too, his office is adorned with sketches of characters from the 2004 comedy "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" drawn by his daughter. Unlike the titular character, portrayed by Will Ferrell, Lorenz's pregame routine doesn't include guzzling down scotch and intoning homonyms in front of a mirror.

"I've tried but they just won't let me," Lorenz joked.

Joking aside, Lorenz is happy to be working at the top regional sports network in the country, making the long rise from an 11th-grader in California who'd do play-by-play in the stands with his friends to an anchor in small markets in California and Florida to the anchor's chair at YES.

Still, he manages to find perspective.

"Anything I do, as long as the place doesn't burn down I consider it a success."